Emulating Songs You Like
Why do we even write songs?
We write songs, because we want to be in an awesome band, just like our heroes in professional bands. You see them up on stage, belting out their songs with their cool guitars, and light shows, and you want to be them. Well you’ll probably want to write songs like them too. Well this is where you’re going to try and emulate songs you like. When most people set out to write songs, they have an idea of how they want it to sound, like: “I want this song to have a really Black Keys feel to it”.
How to emulate songs
It’s not that hard to take apart how our heroes write their songs. First, get a piece of paper and a pen, then turn on the song, and write down all of the changes in the song such as verse, chorus, break, solo, middle part, whatever you want to call them. Then try and learn how to play the song on guitar, and see how he/she uses the chords, and their voicing. Then try to pick out their melody, and see which scale they use to sing their songs, it’ll usually be either Major, Minor, or Pentatonic.
Steps To Take:
- Try using some of their techniques in your own songs
- Don’t be afraid to base some of your songs of stuff they’ve written, because all musicians copy someone else. Your hero copied his hero, and now you copy them
- Spend some time sitting around with maybe a chord progression, and think: “What would ____ do?”
In summary:
- Take apart songs you like and see how they’re written
- Try and use techniques from those songs in your own writting
- Don’t be afraid to “copy” (and I use this term loosely) some of the songs you like